Every year I create a list of things I would like to do with my spare time over the holiday break.  Unfortunately I rarely get even half way through that list, and this year is no exception.

Two things that are still on my list fall into the Forensics and Malware Analysis realm.

The first is a tool called Memoryze. Memoryze is a free memory analysis tool from the guys and gals at Mandiant. From my understanding Memoryze is a major part of the memory anaysis component of their MIR (Mandiant Intelligent Response) product released as a free tool.

The second is zerowine.  Zerowine is a sourceforge project that largely automates parts of windows malware analysis.  From the documentation it appears to run as a double isolated virtual environment (Wine running under QEmu), and provides a web interface for submitting the malware for analysis. 

Perhaps some of you could help me out with my Christmas list.  If any of you have any first hand experience with either of these tools, pros or cons, which you would be willing to share with our readers, please send them in via our submission page and I would be happy to summarize them for the rest of our readers.

 UPDATES:

Memoryze

Reader Russ McRee from holisticinfosec.org says that Memoryze is a great tool, especially when used with the Audit Viewer tool, another free tool from Mandiant.  That was all Russ was prepared to give us at this time.  His review of Memoryze will be in the February ISSA Journal, and about the same time on holisticinfosec.org's  ISSA toolsmith page.

Mason Pokladnik, a fellow STI Masters student, wrote in saying that he planned on taking a look at Memoryze in the next little bit.  He provided a pointer to an excellent article over at OpenRCE on some of the capabilities of Memoryze for malware analysis.

Zerowine

Reader Brian sent in his experience with Zerowine...

"I did some playing around with Zerowine. I didn't like messing around with qemu on windows so I ported it to vmware
using the following process.

I downloaded the image file and extracted it. Inside you will find an hda1.img file. I downloaded qemu and qemu-img for windows.

Then I used the following command to convert the qemu image to a vmdk file.

qemu-img convert -f raw -O hda1.img zerowine.vmdk

Once you have the vmdk file you can create a new vmware virtual machine with the 2.6 kernel. Then before starting the machine delete the virtual disk and attach the .vmdk file to the image and then boot it up.

I set it up with NAT networking to forward port 8000 then threw a piece of malware at it. It created a report that wasn't too bad. The reports aren't quite as good as CWsandbox reports but it's a pretty good incident response tool."

Thanks Brian!  I will probably do the same thing

-- Rick Wanner rwanner at isc dot sans dot org